AMD officially announces its Z-Series APU

Although it was already leaked on slides a couple of days ago, AMD officially announced its Z-Series APU for tablets, codename Desna. The first chip in the family, Z-01, has already started to ship and can be found in MSI's 110W 10-inch tablet.

The Z-01 looks a lot like the AMD's C-50 APU and you can think of it as an optimized version of the C-50 APU. It features two Bobcat cores clocked at 1.0GHz and Radeon HD 6250 GPU with 80 Stream processors and yet to be confirmed 280MHz GPU clock. The one thing that differentiates the Z-01 from the C-50 is the actual TDP. While C-50 was rated at 9W, the TDP for the Z-01 is just 5.9W.

The new Z-01 should bring longer battery life on tablet devices but the TDP is still far behind the one seen on ARM based chips, or even Intel's Atom Z670 that is rated at just 3W. We'll most likely see more tablets based on this chip pretty soon but MSI's 110W is the first one.